John,

And the EE will serve you well as most engineering departments these days are run by EE moved into management. Only few of the cursed MBAs are still left in place to mangle design departments. And computer science guys only run specialized software shops because in general they can't be expected to stay with a company more than 18 months due to self-preservation job hopping. (I can speak ill of MBAs because I got one after my EE)

Regarding the requirement to chase Microsoft documentation to be considered a programmer... I always say that it sounds like as much fun as being a tax lawyer... every few years, everything you know changes and you must continually catchup with an absurd artificial reality. I prefer the reality of sciences. Bill Gates has no effective plan for forming a internal standards committee for the design of new and seldom published electron physics.

Beyond the embedded systems level, I've worked with a lot of computer science people in telecom planning and I found them generally frustrating. The were more fixated on trying to impress us with worthless table access displays and scrolling without have clue one about the nature of efficient algorithms required to solve very complex network configurations. They didn't care about algorithm efficiency and didn't even realize their mathematical solutions didn't work. But at least they'd be pretty and the user might not ever discover the errors since he'd be scrolling through all the wonderful windows. heheeheh

Our OR department there only wrote engines to solve the network configuration issues. We then bring in a programmer to wrap it in something pretty. Rather like having it giftwrapped. :)

The people that do understand the algorithms and mathematics, the OR people, generally don't know how to program anything of complexity in C. The ability to do both in telecom is very rare and lucrative.

aka J (now running on Win2K and loving it)